Every morning, as I survey the landscape of jeans and blue gingham shirts in my dresser, I ask Alexa about the weather. One day last week, as my virtual assistant chirped out of Amazon's new Echo Show smart speaker, I noticed the voice sounded muffled. I walked into the kitchen and found the Show's 7-inch screen facing the wall. I asked Anna, my fiancée, if she'd moved it. "Yeah," she said, between yoga poses on our living room floor.

Avis Budget Group Inc. said Monday that it will provide fleet support and maintenance services for Waymo's program at its Avis and Budget car rental locations. Under the multiyear deal, Waymo's cars will receive automotive services such as cleanings and oil changes from Avis and be allowed to park at its locations.

I first used a computer to do real work in 1985. I was in college in the Twin Cities, and I remember using the DOS version of Word and later upgraded to the first version of Windows. People used to scoff at the massive gray machines in the computer lab but secretly they suspected something was happening. You could say the information age started in 1965 when Gordon Moore invented Moore's Law (a prediction about how transistors would double every year, later changed to every 18 months). It was all about computing power escalation, and he was right about the coming revolution.

We're almost halfway into 2017 (I know, can you believe it's end of June already?) Rapid improvements in key underlying technologies -- voice recognition and natural language processing – are making these "smart" assistants more capable of letting us use our various devices just by talking to them. The promise of these assistants, ranging from Apple's Siri and Google's Assistant to the newcomer, Samsung's Bixby, is that someday we will each have our own personal, always-listening AI which can respond to any wish and command, like Tony Stark's Jarvis in the movie Iron Man. It's a future vision of computing pulled directly from the pages of science fiction. This is heady stuff, but there are reasons to believe that voice may not become the next computing platform, at least not for a while.

Video plays an increasingly important role in our lives. As consumers, we collectively spend hundreds of millions of hours every day watching and sharing videos on services like YouTube, Facebook or Snapchat. When we are not busy gobbling up video on social media, we produce more of it with our smartphones, GoPro cameras and (soon) AR goggles. As a growing fraction of the planet's population is documenting their lives in video format, we are transitioning from starring in our own magazine (the still image era) to starring in our own reality TV show. All that is arguably just the beginning.

A California-based startup called Instrumental developed an intelligent AI inspection system to help manufactures identify product defects on the assembly line. The California-based startup, founded by two form Apple engineers have raised over $10 million to make it easier to manufacture electronics and head off complicated problems before they start costing companies thousands of dollars a minute. Their customers, including Fortune 500 companies, have used the system to virtually disassemble 16,000 units and to take over 40,000 measurements, all remotely. Instrumental makes a hardware box that goes on the assembly line and takes a photo of every device that passes through and they recently announced their deep learning software called Detect which highlights units that appear defective or anomalous, giving our customers a significant edge in discovering and resolving product issues. Using TITAN X GPUs and cuDNN with the TensorFlow deep learning framework, they are able to process hundreds of units in seconds and identify the most interesting units to review.

Elon Musk has changed the way we think about transport. Larry Page and Sergey Brin have revolutionized the way we learn. Mark Zuckerberg has reshaped how we communicate. A.I., the simulation of human intelligence processes by computer systems, is used by Telsa's self-driving electric cars. Google's search engine from its beginning has been powered by A.I. Facebook uses A.I. for targeted advertising, photo tagging and curated news feeds.

"Transformers: The Last Knight," the fifth installment in the blockbuster franchise from Michael Bay, may have topped the weekend, but all the robot-smashing has gotten a bit rusty at the box office. The Paramount film, which opened Wednesday, took in $45 million in the North American box office over the weekend, placing it in the No. 1 spot ahead of returning titles, "Cars 3" and "Wonder Woman." That's just slightly below expectations and well behind its predecessor, "Transformers: Age of Extinction," which opened with $100 million over three days in 2014 -- making "The Last Knight" the first film in the franchise not to open to $100 million or more. The Gal Gadot-starring "Wonder Woman," meanwhile, made another $25 million over the weekend, pushing the film well past the $300-million mark. Disney/Pixar's "Cars 3" also took in $25 million, helping it inch closer to the $100-million mark.

Automation will force most people out of a job and society will eventually be forced to adopt some form of universal basic income. What are people going to do when they no longer have to work? Initially it seems like a nice problem to have as it will free people to do what they really want to do with their lives. But we define ourselves by how we contribute to society, for most people their career is the answer to who they are and what they do. Some will spend all that extra time doing more of the things they already do with their free time: surfing the internet, watching movies and TV shows, and playing video games.

Dr Crystal Valentine, the company's vice-president of technology strategy, told iTWire in an interview that it was still the very early days of seeing machine learning and deep learning being put to work by enterprises outside academia. Dr Valentine has a background in big data research and practice and before joining MapR, she was a professor of computer science at Amherst College. She has authored various academic publications in the areas of algorithms, high-performance computing, and computational biology and holds a patent for Extreme Virtual Memory. As a former consultant at Ab Initio Software, working with Fortune 500 companies to design and implement high-throughput, mission-critical applications and as a tech expert consulting for equity investors focused on technology, Dr Valentine has developed significant business experience in the enterprise computing industry. Dr Crystal Valentine: Machine learning encompasses a number of different algorithms for training computers to solve specific tasks, including tasks that are part of larger artificial intelligence systems.